Literacy — A Modern Take
For many people, being literate has always meant that you had the ability to read and write. It meant that you were able read a book, interpret its meaning, and hopefully have a constructive conversation about what you just read, and maybe even write about it. Even today, this definition of literacy is still THE ONLY definition that people use. Although it does define literacy in its most basic form, I want to take a deeper look at literacy in the 21st century and talk about how the definition of literacy has evolved over the years — a modern take.
Literacy in the 21st century can have very different definitions based on how you think about it. Honestly, it all depends on who you ask, or who you are talking about. For example, take a hardcore gamer (like myself). Now, some of these gamers might not appear to be the most “traditionally literate” people, but when it comes to the game that they are pouring hours and hours into every day, they are extremely knowledgeable. Does this make them literate? In my opinion yes, it does. These people are able to tell you every little detail about each and every character in a game, explain the lore of the game, and even tell you how to play the game. This is a huge load of information, and it’s really easy for some people to ignore the fact that these gamers are spending time and effort into figuring out each and every aspect of the game. To add on to that, when gamers become proficient at multiple games at once, you are essentially adding more information that they have to process and make use of. Roswell and Burke (2009) give another good example when describing their case studies about the two kids, Peter and Patty. Peter was struggling in the classroom and was even considered to be special needs. Little to his teacher’s knowledge, Peter had profound knowledge when it came to the topic of Naruto. He had advanced knowledge of this digital world of Naruto, where he showed significantly more interest than he did in his school work. In Peter’s case, his literacy was not limited to the classroom. In fact, I’m willing to bet that most students who do not do well in the classroom have at least ONE thing that they are very interested in that highlights their abilities as a learner and as someone who can be considered literate.
This type of situation, as seen with Peter, can be applied to all sorts of things such as engineering, architecture, and all other paths of life. One of the biggest areas where I want to focus this article on is the field of education. Education is evolving everyday, and its up to us future teachers to keep up with the new trends and new technologies that come with evolution. In addition, the students ability to keep up with the new technologies introduced to them may have a major effect on their performance in the class room. There might be students who do badly in the class, but are extremely literate when it comes to using digital texts. On the contrary, there are students who do better with printed texts. Teachers should utilize this information to reform their classroom and find a healthy mixture of both digital and printed texts to accommodate for students that have a preference for one or the other.
Much like the older versions of literacy, we still have to be able to effectively use large amounts of information and communicate with language (Beach, 2013). However, people need to learn and understand the ways in which this information can be presented to them, or the ways in which they are able to present the information themselves. Many technologies and digital media can add additional skills that many printed texts simply cannot do. It is still important for teachers to use standard, printed texts. By ignoring one or the other, we are inhibiting a student’s capacity to learn, and essentially preventing them from being literate in the 21st century.The important thing for us to do now, is to be able to bridge the gap between the digital world and the printed world and make it easier for students to find ways of learning that work best for themselves.
Works Cited
Beach, J.M. (2013, October). 21st Century Literacy, Do you Know? Retreived from http://21centurylit.org/introduction/
Rethinking learning: The 21st Century Learner. (2010, December 10). Video retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0xa98cy-Rw
Rethinking literacy: a modern approach to thinking and learning in a digital age. (2018, March 7). Retrieved from https://researchfeatures.com/2018/03/07/rethinking-literacy-a-modern-approach-to-thinking-and-learning-in-a-digital-age/
Rowsell, J., & Burke, A. (2009). Reading by design: Two case studies of digital reading practices. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(2), 106–118.
Scheer, K. (n.d.). On Demand Learning in the 21st Century Classroom. Lecture presented at TEDxABQED. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS7AFS0WmWQ
